I had a blast doing this. Here is the link.
Now the highlights. The times listed are roughly right.
3:30 to 5:00: My bio
5:00 to 15:00: How I got hooked on economics, especially the role of Harold Demsetz
15:30 to 18:00: Advice Milton Friedman gave 19-year-old me.
18:25: My change in plans after my brother committed suicide.
19:40: My ah-hah moment when I realized that I could really understand some technical economics.
21:15: Demsetz, “Remind me who you are.”
23:00: “No one has wanted me in my life.”
24:00: Tullock is so Tullock.
25:00: Buchanan on the “UCLA disease.”
27:40: How I almost ended my shot at grad school.
29:25: Bob Murphy on “ethnic cleansing” at NYU (humor).
30:00: Axel Leijonhufvud’s depressing orientation talk.
31:20: Demsetz’s no-nonsense approach.
32:00: “Seatbelt Sam” Peltzman.
37:35: Alchian’s class and the UCLA disease.
41:20: Bill Baumol.
44:40: How I got to be a summer intern at Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA).
46:30: My shock in June 1973 when the Old Executive Office Building flew the huge Soviet flag.
48:00: Staying away from price controls.
49:30: Acting senior economist—at age 22.
50:00: My argument with Justice Department’s chief economist, George Hay.
52:50: Niskanen not sold on me for CEA senior economist.
53:20: I said we bought a house; I wish. I should have said we rented a house.
53:40: Feldstein invites me not to come.
54:40: My gotchas on Marty Feldstein’s work are better than those of Ted Kennedy’s staff.
56:00: Boning up on health economics.
57:00: Marty Feldstein’s meeting with whole CEA.
57:20: My big risk to become health economist.
59:00: My perception of Larry Summers’s and Paul Krugman’s views of UCLA.
1:00:00: Honesty is the best policy.
1:03:30: 1970s price controls on oil.
1:08:45: Krugman, Summers famous inflation memo.
1:10:30: Murphy’s and my inflation bet.
1:14:00: My motives in betting.
1:16:40: My Mercatus study of Canada’s 1990s/early 2000s budget cuts.
1:21:50: Post-WWII budget cuts: no depression.
1:24:00: How I got writing on war.
1:26:30: My 1990 Wall Street Journal op/ed on why the U.S. government shouldn’t got to war for oil. (Edited by David Frum.)
1:27:00: Started writing for antiwar.com.
1:28:50: The quality of discussions with my students at the Naval Postgraduate School.
1:29:30: “I didn’t invade Iraq; maybe some of you did.”
1:33:00: “I think it’s something called the First Amendment.”
1:35:00: Q&A with Leon Panetta.
1:38:40: The background to my book The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey.
1:39:50: How Phil Magness came to his libertarian views.
1:41:00: The background to Henderson and Hooper, Making Great Decisions in Business and Life.
1:42:30: Computing present values with an implicit real interest rate of zero.
READER COMMENTS
John Alcorn
Dec 15 2018 at 10:13am
A cornucopia of apercus and insights!
I especially appreciate the fond reminiscences about Harold Demsetz, who to this day remains a generous interlocutor to anyone who engages him.
Scrappy is a word that comes to mind at various twists and turns of your adventures as a libertarian economist!
I hope that you will write a full memoir down the road …
David Henderson
Dec 15 2018 at 10:23am
Thanks, John. I’m not sure about a full memoir, but there’s a partial one in The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey.
Kevin L
Dec 17 2018 at 8:48am
I just finished listening this morning. This is one of the best economics discussions I’ve heard, and I’ve listened to practically all of EconTalk. I like Murphy’s approach of getting into the biographies of libertarian economists. It seems to make the ideas more approachable when you hear the development of these famous people and find that they are as human as anyone.
Dr. Henderson, if you put out a podcast, I would listen. You speak, even off the cuff, clearly, and not at all like the stereotypical retired professor. Even if you just take your blog or the Concise Encyclopedia and give some narration or interviews around the topics, it would be enlightening.
David Henderson
Dec 17 2018 at 1:27pm
Thanks much, Kevin L. I appreciate your compliments.
I do like Bob Murphy’s conversational style. It fits my way of talking. I’ve always been fascinated by people’s stories: my own view is that there are few uninteresting ones. From an early age, I asked older people about their lives and got good stories in response because I was asking people to talk about what was likely their favorite subject: themselves. One thing, though, that I couldn’t get people in my father’s generation to talk about, if they had seen combat, was WWII.
Speaking of WWII, I’m so glad that I interviewed my uncle Fred in 1993, a year before he died, and learned that he probably saved some Jews in his prison camp in Upper Silesia by reporting some illegal behavior to what he called the “Swiss Protecting Power” when they visited the camp to, presumably, enforce the Geneva Conventions. Then, even though I thought my father’s story would be boring–how interesting could the story of a school teacher and high school principal be, after all–it wasn’t. The morning I got the expected call that my father had died, after I called and made the funeral arrangements, I put the VHS tape in the recorder and watched the interview. I’m so glad I did.
Thanks for your suggestions. I’ll think about them.
Comments are closed.